Religion in America

We often call Americans our friends, but only occasionally do we admit that we don’t know them at all. Russian literature has not yet produced a single more or less serious work that bears the stamp of a real study of American life. And such a study could be instructive for us in many ways. The young American people have practically resolved many of the issues that fruitlessly worry the aged peoples of Europe. This applies equally to the social and political as well as to the religious sphere of life. But if the social and political life of the American people was partly reflected in Russian and translated foreign literature, then almost no echoes reached us about their religious life, even through foreign literature. Meanwhile, the religious life of the American people at the moment is of perhaps even more instructive interest than their social and political life. The study of this life can also have important immediate significance. In it the mind of a religious person will find encouragement and reinforcement of the confidence that the disbelief and coldness towards religion spreading in the Old World are not the result of high culture, but the fruit of moral decrepitude, since, on the contrary, religion nowhere has more energy and importance than among the most educated people in the world - in America. This book is the result of study and personal observation of American religious life during our stay in New York and intends to lift at least one edge of the dark veil that closes from us the religious life of the American people. It represents a collection of individual articles written by us at various times and later included in our special study on Roman Catholicism in America, where they appear in their organic connection. Since they have independent interest, we considered it not unnecessary to publish them separately. Of the questions considered in it, the first concerns the general religious condition of the American people, and in the first article the reader will find an exposition of the deeply interesting process of centralization of American religious consciousness, expressed in the weakening of sectarian ferment and in the search for the one true church. The second article depicts the tragic epic of the missionary labors of the Jesuits among the Indians, consisting of the complete destruction of the fruits of terrible efforts. The third deals with the important question of freedom of religious conscience in America, the essence of which is so little known among us, despite the fact that it is so often pointed out as a model by our champions of all freedom. Finally, the fourth article presents an outline of the religious question in the American school, the clarification of which is all the more necessary because the so-called secularization of the American school constitutes the secret dream of a significant part of Russian journalism, which very often does not love its own, because it does not have a proper understanding of what is foreign. You might be interested in: